Ah, what a disappointment this was. Observer was a game that I was really looking forward to playing, being a big fan of the cyberpunk genre. And with rainy skies, blue-grey color grading, neon lights, and commercial advertisements everywhere, it seemed to be taking all the right tropes pioneered by Blade Runner and Neuromancer and combining them with an interesting premise- what if a cop was able to hack into the minds of suspects without warrant? This would not only allow the storytellers to tackle conventional cyberpunk themes like corporate hegemony, income inequality, and the unregulated proliferation of technology, but also new ideas like the privacy rights of criminals, body horror, and the line between consciousness and artificial intelligence.
Alas, few of those are on display here, and those that are are restricted to a few optional conversations you will have to go out of your way to find. For the most part, Observer is more interested in telling a standard mystery interrupted by moments of wannabe psychedelic insanity.
You play as Daniel Lazarski, a police officer who possesses a device that allows him to access the minds of everyone. He does this through connecting wires to a microchip that the vast majority of the populace has installed in their brain following a singularity-esque development that allowed humans to comfortably merge with big and small tech. Lazarski is your typical gruff, wise-ass, hardboiled detective with a tortured past. And though Rutger Hauer does a good job bringing out these qualities via a nice delivery, I ultimately felt he was too old for the part (Lazarski seems like someone who would be in their 50s).
Still, it's an interesting premise, especially with Observer's backstory revealing a war that left corporations in control of the state and destitution everywhere. But as I stated before, it's not utilized well, and a large part of that has to do with the setting of the game. Observer takes place almost entirely in a rundown apartment complex. Outside of some hologram projections here and there, it's aesthetically pretty standard- where's the wonder, the pizzazz, the sense of discovery that comes from cyberpunk worlds? Look at Blade Runner with its monolithic skyscrapers and lively populace, Neuromancer with its black markets and arcades, Deus Ex with its visage of Hong Kong and post-pandemic New York. For a game that clearly spent a lot of time conceiving a strong background, it's a shame that it's mostly wasted on a futurized recreation of The Raid.
I say mostly because the moments where Lazarski enters memories briefly gives rise to new places like office buildings where people worked, nature environs where individuals ran through, and luxury areas where more affluent characters lived. The issue is you don't really get a sense of exploration because these moments are intended to be fragmentary (representing the reality of how memory works), so you're frequently experiencing artificating/"glitching" that rapidly changes how things are depicted. As a result, they don't help with Observer's lack of diversity.
From a storytelling perspective, these moments also falter because they just aren't that interesting. I'm under the impression that Bloober Team/Anshar Studios intended for such moments to be trippy psychologically-tense action beats that simultaneously divulge story, but the problem is they drag for sooooooo long. What should've been 5 minutes at best stretches to 10-20, and it not only hurts the pacing but tires out the fragmentary, ghost horror gimmick that they were clearly going for. Outside of some small stealth sections (which are nowhere near as bad as some critics have made them out to be), there are lite puzzles thrown in, but the majority of them are of the tedious nature (and subject to bugs- more on that later) and affect the pacing even more.
My point is this- if you're expecting the open-your-mind scene from Doctor Strange polymorphized with feelings of terror in these mind hacking scenes, you won't get it. What you will get instead is a decent concept of memoria haziness stretched to the point of boredom with 1-2 important pieces of story told over the course of 10-20 minutes. Not well done and a big disappointment.
The main narrative itself (which is where cyberpunk usually excels) isn't anything to write home about. Lazarski travels to this tenement slum because he traces a call from his estranged son, Adam, there. Most of the title is spent attempting to figure out what transpired and where Adam is. Crime scenes are another prominent feature of Observer wherein you will have to investigate a room for clues, but it ultimately comes down to just finding the clues and triggering an internal conversation wherein Lazarki will put two-and-two together, meaning no real detective work is done on your part. And yes, I understand this is is a problem, in general, for games that try to incorporate crime scene investigation into their worlds (the Arkham series, LA Noire, and AC Origins all come to mind), but Observer suffers more because it features two unique tools in your set- Biovision, that allows you to find genetic/biological abnormalities, and Electromagnetic vision, which allows you to find electronic abnormalities. Both are really cool aesthetically, and could've gone a long way towards creating environmental puzzles to solve to acquire clues, but since they're just used as an alternate eyeglass lens, they're essentially a mandatory visceral stepping stone to the aforestated conventional trope of finding clues by looking around for the outwardly placed object (i.e. instead of going from A - C, you're now going from A -> B -> C). What's worse is that using these visions triggers Lazarski's stress meter, which can only be quelled through taking synchrozine pills, which are essentially just a dumber version of the Malaria pills from Far Cry 2. Why punish players for wanting to investigate or analyze things of their own accord? Refusing to take it results in your screen becoming crackly.
Side missions, or rather side stories, are another thing you can do in the game via finding them either through exploration or continuing the main campaign and triggering their events. Because Observer lacks any combat system and reserves its psycho-romps for the main story, most of these missions ultimately culminate in dialogues rather than anything actiony. Which isn't inherently bad, but it's hampered by the slow delivery of all parties involved. Seriously, I couldn't tell if this was a sound mixing error or a deliberate decision by the ADR director, but everyone speaks so slowly that a 2 minute convo gets dragged out to 5. They do talk about interesting things at times, like when Lazarski speaks to a man whose family has rejected any cybernetic implants on principle, but they are also just as many times when the conversation devolves to some dumb form of comedy (a guy who's been stuck in a VR helmet) or cliche crime tropes (drug dealing) over the more interesting philosophical conversations that a cyberpunk world can provide.
Granted, there could be a lot more side content and I just didn't find it because of how terribly designed the apartments are. Seriously, to get to one section of one floor, you have to take a corridor to it- if you want to get to another section of that floor, you have to find an adjacent corridor on one of the floors of that first section and then travel to there, or backtrack to the foyer and find a new hallway to take to that section. And even if you do find the other sections, you'll be hard-pressed to actually locate the specific room you're targeting since so many broken down walls and barriers exist in every section that it makes navigation amongst them a pain in the ass. If this comes-off as confusing to read, you can imagine how baffling it is to actually play it. This might've been alleviated had they provided a mobile map of some kind for Dan to access, but no, maps are restricted to being holographic static ones placed on a single wall of a single floor of a single section that you'll have to memorize to plan your routes (though at least they are kind enough to show the direction Dan is facing).
The music is good, though I admittedly didn't pay too much attention to it given that a lot of it felt ambient. It's excellent in that regard, hyping up the thriller aspects or requisite atmosphere necessitated. There were times where a veer into unconventional music like Jazz would play, and the execution was too sloppy to be good, but for the most part it was solid. Unfortunately, the horror aspects, in general, aren't good enough to boosted by music. Most of the horror in Observer comes down to cheap jump scares, which wear out their welcome very quickly. It's a shame, because the claustrophobic nature of the tenement building could've been fodder for some Shining-level atmospheric dread.
The story itself ends on a decently interesting note, opting for an unconventional darker twist regardless of the path you choose. But because there is no sequel to follow-up on the events, and because the relationship between Lazarki and Adam isn't that well developed in general, it can't help but feel incomplete and unsatisfying.
Lastly, Observer is just poorly optimized. Graphically it looks good with strongly textured environments and the color scheme working artistic wonders for the world ala Alien: Isolation, but it's hampered by janky-looking human models (fixed in Redux) and really bad artifacting that wasn't caused by the game. Seriously, I had to turn off the motion blur in the options section to alleviate this problem (as well as increase the brightness past recommended levels to see anything), but it didn't completely stop the anti-aliasing from being outright bad. I also encountered several glitches that forced me to restart, like Dan getting stuck in one place or an object I had to move disappearing behind a wall, but luckily Observer offers a very forgiving autosave that alleviates most of the latter.
So yeah, overall I can't recommend Observer. A disappointing story combined with disappointing gameplay set in a poorly designed hub that falters in comparison to other cyberpunk worlds culminates in the game being a letdown. System Redux may offer better graphics and more side missions, but it won't fix the major issues present here.
Alas, few of those are on display here, and those that are are restricted to a few optional conversations you will have to go out of your way to find. For the most part, Observer is more interested in telling a standard mystery interrupted by moments of wannabe psychedelic insanity.
You play as Daniel Lazarski, a police officer who possesses a device that allows him to access the minds of everyone. He does this through connecting wires to a microchip that the vast majority of the populace has installed in their brain following a singularity-esque development that allowed humans to comfortably merge with big and small tech. Lazarski is your typical gruff, wise-ass, hardboiled detective with a tortured past. And though Rutger Hauer does a good job bringing out these qualities via a nice delivery, I ultimately felt he was too old for the part (Lazarski seems like someone who would be in their 50s).
Still, it's an interesting premise, especially with Observer's backstory revealing a war that left corporations in control of the state and destitution everywhere. But as I stated before, it's not utilized well, and a large part of that has to do with the setting of the game. Observer takes place almost entirely in a rundown apartment complex. Outside of some hologram projections here and there, it's aesthetically pretty standard- where's the wonder, the pizzazz, the sense of discovery that comes from cyberpunk worlds? Look at Blade Runner with its monolithic skyscrapers and lively populace, Neuromancer with its black markets and arcades, Deus Ex with its visage of Hong Kong and post-pandemic New York. For a game that clearly spent a lot of time conceiving a strong background, it's a shame that it's mostly wasted on a futurized recreation of The Raid.
I say mostly because the moments where Lazarski enters memories briefly gives rise to new places like office buildings where people worked, nature environs where individuals ran through, and luxury areas where more affluent characters lived. The issue is you don't really get a sense of exploration because these moments are intended to be fragmentary (representing the reality of how memory works), so you're frequently experiencing artificating/"glitching" that rapidly changes how things are depicted. As a result, they don't help with Observer's lack of diversity.
From a storytelling perspective, these moments also falter because they just aren't that interesting. I'm under the impression that Bloober Team/Anshar Studios intended for such moments to be trippy psychologically-tense action beats that simultaneously divulge story, but the problem is they drag for sooooooo long. What should've been 5 minutes at best stretches to 10-20, and it not only hurts the pacing but tires out the fragmentary, ghost horror gimmick that they were clearly going for. Outside of some small stealth sections (which are nowhere near as bad as some critics have made them out to be), there are lite puzzles thrown in, but the majority of them are of the tedious nature (and subject to bugs- more on that later) and affect the pacing even more.
My point is this- if you're expecting the open-your-mind scene from Doctor Strange polymorphized with feelings of terror in these mind hacking scenes, you won't get it. What you will get instead is a decent concept of memoria haziness stretched to the point of boredom with 1-2 important pieces of story told over the course of 10-20 minutes. Not well done and a big disappointment.
The main narrative itself (which is where cyberpunk usually excels) isn't anything to write home about. Lazarski travels to this tenement slum because he traces a call from his estranged son, Adam, there. Most of the title is spent attempting to figure out what transpired and where Adam is. Crime scenes are another prominent feature of Observer wherein you will have to investigate a room for clues, but it ultimately comes down to just finding the clues and triggering an internal conversation wherein Lazarki will put two-and-two together, meaning no real detective work is done on your part. And yes, I understand this is is a problem, in general, for games that try to incorporate crime scene investigation into their worlds (the Arkham series, LA Noire, and AC Origins all come to mind), but Observer suffers more because it features two unique tools in your set- Biovision, that allows you to find genetic/biological abnormalities, and Electromagnetic vision, which allows you to find electronic abnormalities. Both are really cool aesthetically, and could've gone a long way towards creating environmental puzzles to solve to acquire clues, but since they're just used as an alternate eyeglass lens, they're essentially a mandatory visceral stepping stone to the aforestated conventional trope of finding clues by looking around for the outwardly placed object (i.e. instead of going from A - C, you're now going from A -> B -> C). What's worse is that using these visions triggers Lazarski's stress meter, which can only be quelled through taking synchrozine pills, which are essentially just a dumber version of the Malaria pills from Far Cry 2. Why punish players for wanting to investigate or analyze things of their own accord? Refusing to take it results in your screen becoming crackly.
Side missions, or rather side stories, are another thing you can do in the game via finding them either through exploration or continuing the main campaign and triggering their events. Because Observer lacks any combat system and reserves its psycho-romps for the main story, most of these missions ultimately culminate in dialogues rather than anything actiony. Which isn't inherently bad, but it's hampered by the slow delivery of all parties involved. Seriously, I couldn't tell if this was a sound mixing error or a deliberate decision by the ADR director, but everyone speaks so slowly that a 2 minute convo gets dragged out to 5. They do talk about interesting things at times, like when Lazarski speaks to a man whose family has rejected any cybernetic implants on principle, but they are also just as many times when the conversation devolves to some dumb form of comedy (a guy who's been stuck in a VR helmet) or cliche crime tropes (drug dealing) over the more interesting philosophical conversations that a cyberpunk world can provide.
Granted, there could be a lot more side content and I just didn't find it because of how terribly designed the apartments are. Seriously, to get to one section of one floor, you have to take a corridor to it- if you want to get to another section of that floor, you have to find an adjacent corridor on one of the floors of that first section and then travel to there, or backtrack to the foyer and find a new hallway to take to that section. And even if you do find the other sections, you'll be hard-pressed to actually locate the specific room you're targeting since so many broken down walls and barriers exist in every section that it makes navigation amongst them a pain in the ass. If this comes-off as confusing to read, you can imagine how baffling it is to actually play it. This might've been alleviated had they provided a mobile map of some kind for Dan to access, but no, maps are restricted to being holographic static ones placed on a single wall of a single floor of a single section that you'll have to memorize to plan your routes (though at least they are kind enough to show the direction Dan is facing).
The music is good, though I admittedly didn't pay too much attention to it given that a lot of it felt ambient. It's excellent in that regard, hyping up the thriller aspects or requisite atmosphere necessitated. There were times where a veer into unconventional music like Jazz would play, and the execution was too sloppy to be good, but for the most part it was solid. Unfortunately, the horror aspects, in general, aren't good enough to boosted by music. Most of the horror in Observer comes down to cheap jump scares, which wear out their welcome very quickly. It's a shame, because the claustrophobic nature of the tenement building could've been fodder for some Shining-level atmospheric dread.
The story itself ends on a decently interesting note, opting for an unconventional darker twist regardless of the path you choose. But because there is no sequel to follow-up on the events, and because the relationship between Lazarki and Adam isn't that well developed in general, it can't help but feel incomplete and unsatisfying.
Lastly, Observer is just poorly optimized. Graphically it looks good with strongly textured environments and the color scheme working artistic wonders for the world ala Alien: Isolation, but it's hampered by janky-looking human models (fixed in Redux) and really bad artifacting that wasn't caused by the game. Seriously, I had to turn off the motion blur in the options section to alleviate this problem (as well as increase the brightness past recommended levels to see anything), but it didn't completely stop the anti-aliasing from being outright bad. I also encountered several glitches that forced me to restart, like Dan getting stuck in one place or an object I had to move disappearing behind a wall, but luckily Observer offers a very forgiving autosave that alleviates most of the latter.
So yeah, overall I can't recommend Observer. A disappointing story combined with disappointing gameplay set in a poorly designed hub that falters in comparison to other cyberpunk worlds culminates in the game being a letdown. System Redux may offer better graphics and more side missions, but it won't fix the major issues present here.